Strom

There was rapid snowfall today, but certainly not a surprise. The local media has been warning about a snowstorm for about a week. Also, most of the snowfall happened during the night, so it was almost all there by the morning.

It might be cromulent to some, but in my experience it is not widespread. Definitely done at a much lower rate than other places like reddit. Main indicator of this is that on HN it's not uncommon to see an upvoted comment that has almost exclusively argumentative replies. However on reddit when I see a comment with so many disagreeing responses, it's well into the negative.

Also, at a sample point of one, I make an effort to never downvote because of disagreement. I don't behave that way on reddit. Something about herd mentality perhaps.

For me, Winamp still offers two things that most other players don't:

1) Global hotkeys to navigate through my playlists, enqueue songs, control playback etc. Also the global pop-up window (Ctrl+Alt+J) with my current playlist has a really fast search function as I type. Only 'Everything' has faster search. Otherwise modern apps have very slow searches.

2) Milkdrop 2. I have a very large curated collection of visualization presets for Milkdrop 2. This is not something I use when I'm behind the computer, but it's awesome to have running on some screens during a party as the visualizations are in sync with the music.

> But that 5000 IU/day put me near overdose territory when I got my serum levels checked.

I need to consume 4000 IU/day just to keep my serum levels acceptable. I do agree though that blood tests are necessary. When I started getting into the vitamin D supplements, I had my blood levels tested every 3 months for a few years. I started out dangerously deficient and even 8000 IU/day was barely moving the needle in the beginning. However over a longer period 8000 IU/day ended up being too much, so I cut it down to 4000 IU/day where I've been for years now.

There are a lot of factors going into this and everyone's circumstances are different. Frequent testing to verify assumptions is a must.

I spend a good amount of time outside, going running regularly, and am in decent shape. I also eat 250g of salmon weekly, which contains about 1000-2500 IU. However at the end of the day I live in the north (59 deg lat) and the sun here is of limited impact.

You could do a community purchase with your neighbors. Where I'm from people even register officially as cooperatives in order to buy stuff at bulk with proper accounting. Now some people who are super poor might also have horrible social skills, but that is already a compounding issue and moves goal posts.

> I'd wager most people use streaming platforms nowadays over downloading music locally

Yes and this very same data shows that the top 4 most popular options are streaming platforms.

> people are not internally consistent

There are those with cognitive dissonance, i.e. those who will actually verbalize contradicting thoughts. However there are also plenty of people whose thoughts are fully consistent and logical. That said, those people will still behave contradictory to their thoughts.

> You won’t cajole people into reconciling their beliefs into a cohesive elegant whole

Logical arguments won't work on persuading an illogical person, that's true. However you don't have to live with it. There are plenty of other options besides logical arguments. There's bribing, coercion, and manipulation. Emotional appeal being a really successful technique in the manipulation category.

> .. and that includes yourself

Indeed it does. Logical thinking is great, but primarily done by the left brain hemisphere. I often witness myself doing things while thinking to myself how this wasn't the plan and how I still don't agree with my actions. That's because my plan was made primarily by logical thinking with no extra steps. However there is plenty of manipulation I can do on myself. For example if I have cookies that I shouldn't eat, the more effective strategy is to throw them away the first chance I get (to increase friction, the right hemisphere seems to love laziness), as opposed to thinking that I can always keep myself from eating them with pure willpower.

Depends on the specifics. In this case one of the two companies involved is headquartered in the EU, so the mechanisms are the same as if two EU companies were trying to buy eachother.

Now if we assume a more interesting situation where neither of the companies are headquartered in the EU, but still do business in the EU. Then the number of mechanisms shrinks, but not by much. The EU could just fine the companies out of existance for not complying. See examples of the EU fining Microsoft, Google, or Facebook. Not that they stopped existing, but it shows that the EU can successfully fine these companies. Another example more closely related to buying is ARM. ARM is owned by a Japanese company, and Nvidia (a US company) is seeking to buy it. Yet the EU is looking into whether they'll allow it. [1]

The fewest options are in the case where both companies are fully located outside the EU and do no business in the EU. However if some of their subcontractors are in the EU, then go back to the paragraph above. Now if these two companies are are fully, along with their full supply chain, outside of EU jurisdiction. Then the options get pretty slim. Most efficient mechanism probably being diplomatic talks. EU diplomats could ask a country that has jurisdiction (say the US) to block the sale, and in return the US would get some sweet gains elsewhere. Classic diplomatic bargaining.

--

[1] https://www.theverge.com/2021/10/27/22266504/nvidia-arm-deal...

> Disney, DC Comics and the like must've complained about bad ratings/unfavourable like/dislike ratios I guess..

The most disliked video on YouTube happens to be a video made by YouTube themselves. [1] I guess they really didn't like that.

--

[1] YouTube Rewind 2018 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most-disliked_YouTube_...

Wolt is the first food delivery app I used years ago. It has been convenient, but I definitely started taking it for granted.

I was shocked when I traveled to Germany and used their popular app Lieferando. That app didn't even have a dynamic GPS based map, instead it showed a static map with a constant "ETA 30min". They might as well have just sent me a text with "ETA 30min" as there was no functional difference. Best part was that the courrier never arrived and the app kept showing me "ETA 30min" even two days later. Of course there was no in-app support contact. Only way to contact them was via e-mail and it took them multiple days to respond. The response was very hostile and they claimed that because the courrier couldn't find the address (a giant hotel building) they just didn't make the delivery and that's how it is. Ended up having to do a chargeback.

Contrasting this to Wolt, where I've never had any issues with delivery (and there's a real time map of the courrier's location). When I've had wrong items delivered, the in-app customer support chat has been reasonable and they've just given me credit for a new order.

I'm not sure where DoorDash falls on this spectrum. I've certainly read horror stories about DoorDash here on HN, but hopefully they've improved. Would be a real shame to lose Wolt's premium experience.

The EU definitely has a say. It's true that Finland can choose to leave the EU, but it's disingenuous to say that EU doesn't have a say.

However "having a say" goes even further, because Wolt operates also outside the EU. Any country it operates in will have a clear say. Even countries it doesn't operate in will have a say if they have leverage over any of the countries where Wolt operates in. So in this case, the US will have a say, even though Wolt doesn't even operate in the US.

What factory is that and are you sure it's not just the Paldiski waste that the government has been dealing with for decades, figuring how to get rid of it?

At least Estonia itself won't be a repeat customer in the short to medium term, because it doesn't really produce any significant waste.

The radioactive waste in question is most likely what was left behind by the Russians when their army finally left Estonia in 1995. The Russians developed two closed nuclear port cities in Estonia during Soviet occupation. One for mining uranium for atomic bomb purposes (Sillamäe) and another one for nuclear submarines with two reactors (Paldiski). When they finally left, these cities were left to decay - along with the nuclear waste.

Sweden helped Estonia build a temporary containment facility in 1997, but that is designed to last only until ~2050. So there is still a need to figure out a more permanent storage location. There is also environmental research going on to see if it's feasible to build such a facility in Estonia.

This ship-it-to-Utah plan is quite interesting. It makes sense from Estonia's side when you consider that Estonia has no long term storage capability itself. Although I imagine the distance makes the logistics of transport very interesting. It's "easy" to get it on a ship from Estonia, given that the temporary storage is next to the sea [1] that is connected to the Atlantic ocean. However the transport from US east coast to Utah sounds pretty tricky. I guess they could take the ship through the Panama canal, which might make it a bit easier.

For those who are interested, there are two local news reports that have video showing the temporary storage facility. One in Estonian [2] and a different one in Russian [3]. For the deep researchers I'll also provide a link to a government report detailing some of the history, stats, and potential plans around this waste - in Estonian. [4]

--

[1] https://www.google.com/maps/@59.3607991,24.1080561,403m/data...

[2] https://www.err.ee/1030469/paldiskisse-tahetakse-rajada-lopl...

[3] https://www.err.ee/1156109/insight-radioaktiivsete-jaatmete-...

[4] Download "Radioaktiivsete jäätmete käitlemise riiklik tegevuskava | 2.23 MB | pdf" from https://envir.ee/kliima-ja-keskkonnakaitse/kiirgus/radioakti...

The most obvious that comes to mind is eval. However a custom function could also be dangerous, e.g. a function that posts some sensetive information to a REST API where the attacker can control the variable that defines the API endpoint address and thus can send the information to themselves.

Yes, for a slew of reasons, including that the US wants its companies to have favorable access to the EU market.

Nvidia drivers work just fine with no networking, I've used them so frequently.

The anti-mining technique that Nvidia uses depends on firmware modifications as well. Thus the firmware of these stolen GPUs must already support such a banlist.

Two reasons why this won't work:

1) The GPU probably already comes with a driver CD that can't have this serial number marked as stolen.

2) Even if you use a downloaded driver, you can just use the last version that didn't contain the serial.

You'll be left out of future driver updates, but that is of no concern to miners.

How would it be a thing? You don't even need a network card, much less a network connection, to use a GPU. I guess they could manufacture these in a way that requires online activation of the firmware, but that would be a big step in the wrong direction of consumer rights.

Referencing the atomic bomb in this context is also manipulation. You're trying to evoke emotion, as opposed to arguing your point with boring facts.

My analogy wasn't about any special processing or any special segment of garbage. It was a more basic comparison that we as a western society depend heavily on regular garbage takeaway (because we consume so much single use crap) but the people who take away our garbage aren't paid much and get looked down upon on top of that. So it's an important part of society that is severely underpriced compared to the value it provides. One of the primary reasons it can be so underpriced is because the workforce can be trivially trained (relatively speaking) and there seems to always be enough people interested in working.

From your comment that the lithium market is so small, yet always talked about as criticial - I guessed that perhaps that's because it's similarly easy to find and train lithium miners.

As for Elon and lithium, I remember recently watching some interview or talk that he gave, where he mentioned that he doesn't consider lithium a problem at all precicely because it is so abundant in the US.

So yes, to me it seems as well that there is no scarcity to fear. There might be a temporary shortage, but it can be solved rather quickly with money.

It is not irrelevant. Once again, it's about more than individual gains, it's about group gains. A vaccinated person can still carry the virus even if they themselves are relatively fine. Not wanting to be in contact with higher risk people (the unvaccinated) helps prevent the spread of the virus.

> It is strange how the vaccinated seem to be the ones most scared of the disease while the unvaccinated just get on with their lives.

I don't see how that is strange at all. Clearly the vaccinated people are much more likely to consider the virus to be a serious threat as compared to the unvaccinated who tend to brush it off as either a minor annoyance or straight up fake propaganda.

This can be seen in all sorts of other areas. It's the climate scientists who are most scared of climate change, it's the cryptographers who are most scared of broken cryptography, it's the educated who are most scared of drinking from the same river the village pees in.

Come on now. That's changing the goal posts. Natural resource extraction is also a multi-trillion dollar industry.

Willing to mingle with people very different from yourself is a very new phenomenon and certainly not widespread. It's nice that you can look past the differences.

> SARS2 is not a big threat to vaccinated people. Why the hysteria?

Even if we assume that it's not a threat to the vaccinated, it is still very much a threat to the non-vaccinated. All sorts of pandemic measures are designed to help society as a whole, not just the individual obeying the rules.

> How are these materials simultaneously of such importance, and also so economically minor. What am I missing here?

My guess is the amount of skill required to get these materials. Miners can be paid pennies and they'll still do the work. Something similar to how garbage takeaway is of very high importance, but economically pretty minor.

> Them using an Element bridge is no different than them using an extra device you didn't know about.

It is different in a big way. That extra device would most likely only transit this one user's messages. The Element bridge transits a ton of users and as such is an attractive target for mass surveillance.

> That device could've well been [..] hosted in the cloud.

The capability of self-hosting is very niche. Only technical people could pull that off. Element is working hard to make using this bridge so easy that your grandmother could do it.

> do you have compute, do you have load balancing, do you have rbac, do you have DB? do you have storage?

Yes, they have all of those things. They have a pretty decent webpage that goes into more detail. https://www.cloudflare.com/

Go is not in the business of copy-pasting other language designs. That much should be obvious by now.

The questions aren't around the algorithms. They're about Go specific things like how to deal with legacy std library parts that are made obsolete by generics.

You're probably being underpaid even for Latvia. The first thing you should change in your analysis is that you should compare your salary to other software developers, not the general national average for all people. I would hope that the Central Statistic Bureau of Latvia provides this data, but you'd have to search for it yourself.

I'm from Estonia (immediate neighbor of Latvia with a similar history) and the statistics here [1] paint a healthier picture. The median software developer salary in Estonia for Q2 2021 was 3300€/month (39600€/year), with the average being even higher (3460€/41520€). These are national level statistics, so the numbers are even higher if you work for one of the local unicorns or Microsoft.

You should probably start demanding more money. Not US levels of compensation, but at least figure out the local Latvian median for software developers and aim for that to start with.

--

[1] Search for "Software developer" at https://palgad.stat.ee/en

> Cloudflare has always had free bandwidth

Only for HTML content. [1] That is the real disruption here.

--

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28682885

> However how there is time to firstly make "main thread on single core" monster and then redo it according to game development 101 - make use of GPU.

The single threaded code was taken from Microsoft Flight Simulator X, the previous version of this game from 2006. It was not done from scratch for the new game, and it still hasn't been replaced. They've just optimized parts of it now.

Another important performance bottleneck is due to the fact that the game's UI is basically Electron. That's right, they're running a full blown browser on top of the rest of the graphis for the UI. Browsers are notoriusly slow because they support a million edge cases that aren't always needed in a game UI.

For anyone interested in learning more about Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020 optimizations I can recommend checking out the Digital Foundry interview with the game's technical director. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=32abllGf77g